A new e-zine is attracting advertisers keen for street
credibility, writes Michelle Griffin.

IN APRIL, a new weekly email "magazine" called Three Thousand
(after the CBD's postcode) started arriving in the inboxes of about
300 Melburnians working in media, marketing and design.

In look and feel, this cheerful catalogue of what was "cool" and
"fool" around Melbourne resembled many other underground
publications and websites devoted to street culture.

But Three Thousand was slickly produced, distributed through a
media database, offered weekly prizes such as designer T-shirts and
mobile phones, and came ready-sponsored by Converse.

Just as people began to wonder if this chatty weekly was part of
a viral marketing campaign for the sneaker multinational, Grolsch
Beer and Levis started advertising, too.

Who is behind Three Thousand? At the bottom of every email, the
credits panel insists that advertisers do not pay for any of the
editorial. The e-zine is "compiled by an amorphous gaggle of
writers, stylists, designers, photographers, sub-cultural attaches
and a large troupe of monkeys who enjoy working for peanuts".

But while Three Thousand is not advertising in editorial
clothing, the personnel are far from an amorphous gaggle of
scenesters producing a magazine for fun. Nor is it just a
single-operator online publication such as Stephen Mayne's original
Crikey or local fashion update Michi Girl.

It wasn't until the 18th edition, four months after launch, that
the people behind Three Thousand outed themselves as Right Angle
Publishing, a joint venture between three Melbourne-based youth
marketing groups: Flaunt, the Co-Op and the Taboo Group.

By this time, Three Thousand had 3300 subscribers and spawned a
sister publication, Two Thousand, in Sydney.

"It's important to be the one to do it first," says Barton. "We
launched Sydney before we were really ready because we wanted to
make sure nobody else got there before us." The same approach has
fuelled the rapid launch of podcasts, blogs and the Three Thousand
pop-up shop Old and New, a three-day indie designer boutique set up
on the sixth floor of Curtain House in Swanston Street.

The angle is now obvious - the venture's street culture emails
provide an outlet where the companies' clients can enhance their
cool factor by being promoted alongside new bars, hot bands and the
work of local artists. The venture is supported by a roster of
advertisers keen for credibility, although only one advertiser is
displayed in each email.

It costs $1300 to advertise in an edition of Three Thousand but
the price is pegged to grow with the subscriber base. So far, it's
proved more popular than profitable, although it's starting to
cover its own costs.

Barton says he came up with the concept for Three Thousand when
he moved back to Melbourne last year after a short stint in Sydney
editing the street magazine Large. When that publication
folded, Barton returned south and set up his own marketing
company.

"I found Melbourne really impenetrable," he says. "There wasn't
much I could find that worked as a good reference to it." Out of
this frustration, he says, came the idea to publish a weekly guide
to the city's subcultures. The first issue was put together with
friends and relations, including his 22-year-old brother, Chris,
Three Thousand's editor.

Although Barrie Barton insists the email magazine didn't start
"with any financial agenda", he understood that a subculture guide
did offer strong marketing possibilities - if only as a reference
tool. "The best kind of street marketing is where you really do
live the lifestyle," he says.

The two other marketing groups, the Co-Op and the Taboo Group,
came on board soon after the magazine launched. All three companies
are staffed by twentysomethings and work in newer forms of
marketing.

The five-year-old Taboo Group, the most established of the three
companies, specialises in guerilla marketing. Best known for hiring
actors to sing and dance on trains while listening to a new MP3
player, the Taboo Group has also hung the world's largest pair of
underpants in Martin Place, Sydney, to promote the DVD release of
Bridget Jones: Edge of Reason, and hired lookalikes to
impersonate EMI's cartoon supergroup Gorillaz on university
campuses.

The Co-op, only 18 months old, is a branding and design company
that also built displays for Mini cars during Spring fashion week,
and ran Motorola's ambassador program, giving free phones to
fashion designers and DJs.

One-man company Flaunt ran a laneway festival for the bar St
Jeromes as a platform for promoting Levis and Converse.

Now Flaunt and the Co-Op are about to merge, forming a single
company as soon as they can agree on a single brand. But this is
one decision they're not about to rush.

Staff at all three companies still contribute the bulk of the
copy on the weekly emails, taking the photos of cool outfits on the
street, writing up new bars and shops and reproducing images at
local photography exhibitions.

Richard Hack, the Taboo Group's 26-year-old business development
manager, says chasing content for the Three Thousand and Two
Thousand emails "keeps our finger on the pulse".

The company is also considering tapping into the database to
recruit subjects for market research. Companies pay a great deal to
find out what these early adapters really think.

But Hack acknowledges that any direct market research approach
might scare off the subscribers they want to attract.

"It's a big danger," he says. "It's quite a delicate process.
Rather than rape it for all it's worth, we have to make sure it's
well-received.

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